POTBR Blog 3- Day 3

 Day 3 - Today we met with The Department of Natural Resources Forest Tech George Teters who has been part of the department for over 20 years. ​Here we learned about forest health and the different trees that are all within the mixed conifer of their surrounding forests. PPine, Lodgepole, douglas fir, and Western Large. They seem to have low impacts from the tree beetles that are destroying many forests across the state. The forests look like they do prescribe burning under the canopies of their forests to help reduce devastating impacts of large wildfires as the increase of wildfires have increased since the early 2000s. The surrounding forests are all selective cutting, no signs of complete clear-cutting methods being used. He mentioned something about clear cutting with making sure each acre had 15 trees left. There are no closed areas, just some areas designated for wildlife. From there we went to Cottonwood creek to do some water sampling for our experiments. Checking the velocity, depth, types of bacteria, canopy density, temperature, and turbidity in the creek and the rut water nearby.  Last we used the drone to get some aerial footage of the surrounding area. 


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